October in the Golden Land

It’s a dry month in the city of angels. In October, things crack. Skin, mountains, relationships. Breathing requires conscious effort.

Routines crack. We think we have all the afternoons in the world ahead of us. There’s a rhythm to the way in which you make your way through the monotonous days. All it takes is a four-car pileup on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon to remind you that it all ends.

All it takes is a quick glance out the passenger window that registers in your brain the brief but indelible flashes of a red-stained gurney and shattered glass shards, the thick kind from the windshield, to interrupt that rhythm known as daily life. Those connected images will replay in your head for the remaining hour of your commute—average by LA standards.  

You drive past the barren hills off the 210, scarred badly last time the Santa Ana winds caught a spark in their path. October is not the month to start a brawl with the Universe; the winds effortlessly topple cars and rip through anything in their path. What's left is an inhospitable, crusty brown that stretches for miles on either side of the freeway. Nothing seems like it will ever grown again on these infertile, scraggly slopes. But you put the bleakness out of mind. After all, that was awhile ago. That was the past. And this is LA, “the golden land,” where there exists a habit against looking in the rearview mirrors.

These seemingly out-of-the-ordinary but in fact, statistically ordinary events, remind us that it does end. Of course, it doesn’t seem like it will as you go through the motions of brushing your teeth and driving to the market. We swing wildly between extremes of feeling that things don’t come fast enough and then that they come all too fast.

They say (whoever they are has never been clarified), you only live once. And while I can’t say I agree with that entirely, who’s to say you’ll encounter exceptional teas next time around? There are, no guarantees.

I raise you a cup of raw puer from the mid-1980s, aged beautifully.